The Animators(29)

—

More garbled back-and-forth around me. Someone I’m vaguely sure is Mel. Other people.

I try to pick out curves, get an anchor on where I am. I’m back watching the board in Principles of 2-D Design or Program Layouts 1, and figuring out being smart isn’t the same as being good is just as scary the second time around. Mel’s hand grabs mine.

I’m in a long tunnel. I wonder if I’m being operated on, if they’re going to, if they are right now, the sheet tented over, someone’s phantom hands inside me, manipulating. The black sand of anesthesia, the tin smell of blood. I wonder if I’m dead, or dying.

Mel talks low through the fever dream: I never told you and I never knew and I only wish and please. And she cries, mouth open, spine a soft C.

—

I wake up to silence.

Mel’s sitting next to the bed, cross-legged on a chair, her knee sticking out like a doorknob in denim. She’s hunched. Reaches up to wipe her nose with her wrist. Opens her mouth to exhale like she’s recently wept. Her eyebrows suddenly prick with interest. She’s studying something. I see her mouth gape a little wider. Whatever she’s reading, she’s into it.

I try to lift my arm, can’t. There are things on my forehead and neck and chest and something over my mouth. I hear machines beeping, air streaming.

I turn my neck slightly to the left. It takes effort. It hurts. I see her rake her hand through her hair. She mouths something silently. Blinks. I squint and spot what she’s reading. Panic twists my throat. She’s got my sketcher’s journal. The one I don’t show to anyone.

She’s reading the List.

She finally lifts her head to look at me. When she does, I am positive it is with an expression of betrayal. It’s finally happened. After ten years, she has found me out.

But she starts, sets it aside. “Holy shit,” she says. “You’re awake. Are you awake?” She stands and rubs her nose, breathing hard. “Sharon.”

I stir.

“Don’t do that,” she says. “You’re hooked up to a lot of stuff.”

I can’t keep my eyes open. “Sharon,” she repeats. “Can you hear me?”

I see the frayed Goody hair band that keeps the List together twisted on the table. The darkness swallows me whole.

—

When I wake again, I am alone. The sun glows through the blinds, high and hot. Florida.

The television’s on. I squint. The Today show. There’s Matt Lauer talking into the camera. Behind him in Midtown Manhattan, grinning tourists are saying hey to everyone back in Missouri and Texas and Arkansas.

I make a noise and suck in my breath. It’s a croak. My voice feels like driving on gravel sounds.

I turn my head to look for a call button, a phone, something. It’s work. My neck is fossilized. In the hallway, a wheelchair moves at a clip, propelled by a kid with a crew cut. A nurse swishes by in purple scrubs. Lisa Greaph. But it’s not her.

I lift my right arm. The elbow pops painfully. Skinny. Not mine. I put my hand to my face, press my jaw. Nothing. I can’t feel it.

I can move my legs a little, the right better than the left. There’s the rustling of plastic. It’s a tube, trailing off the side of my bed. It goes into a clear pouch. I feel flayed open between the legs.

On the side rail, a button reading NURSE’S CALL. I pick up my bad arm with my good arm and mash the button with my knuckle. A moment later, there’s the cork-beat-cork of sneakers. A nurse pops up, smiles thinly at me. “Well, look who’s awake.”

She comes over, hands on her hips, checks a monitor. The liquid in the bag tied to the bed slat is the color of Gatorade. “You know how long you been out on us? A whole week. That’s right.”

I try to speak. My mouth is melting down my face.

“What is it, hon.” She leans into me, puts her fingers on my arm, cool and dry.

I realize the bag of pee is mine and start to cry.

“Oh, hon,” she says. “Don’t you cry. Your friend is gonna be so happy to hear you’re awake. We’re gonna call her right now.”

—

Mel comes jogging into the room at lunch, her hair sticking straight up, blond grown out to the tips, glasses smudged. “Aw shit,” she yells, “Kisses is back!” She lifts her arm in the air, comes at me, slings onto the bed, then remembers herself and hugs me gingerly. Tobacco, engine oil, something else—the faint, woodsy tang of oil pencils.

For the first time since I woke up, I’m happy to be conscious.

—

It was a subarachnoid hemorrhagic stroke, caused by an artery on the brain that broke and bled. There’s no one reason for this; the causes are myriad. The doctor disinterestedly ticks off the risk factors: You binge-drink? You smoke? You take speed? You stressed? Family history of fatasses and alcoholics? Yes, yes, yes. I’m told I should have gone to the hospital back in Brooklyn, when the pain started. That I could have died on the plane.

The bleeding was mild to middling, even, not as severe as it could have been. I was, apparently, very lucky. I will regain a lot. I could become fully functioning again. Maybe. The doctors are quick to insist that they don’t know when, and they don’t really know how much “almost full use” is. I am told we will “spur on natural neurological recovery with rehabilitation efforts.”